This course provides an introduction to the politics of war termination and peace consolidation. The course examines the challenges posed by ending wars and the process by which parties to a conflict arrive at victory, ceasefires, and peace negotiations. It explores how peace is sustained, why peace lasts in some cases and breaks down in others and what can be done to make peace more stable, focusing on the role of international interventions, power-sharing arrangements, reconciliation between adversaries, and reconstruction.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission required; contact emccaski@barnard.edu. An introductory course in neuroscience like PSYC 1001 or PSYC 2450. Analysis of the assessment of physical and psychiatric diseases impacting the central nervous system, with emphasis on the relationship between neuropathology and cognitive and behavioral deficits.
This course examines questions in international political economy, asking what we know and how we know it. It addresses questions such as: Why do some countries promote globalization while others resist it? What do IOs do in international politics? Who runs our system of global governance? We will explore these questions and others by focusing on topics such as international trade, foreign aid, investment, and the environment. For each topic, we will use a variety of theoretical lenses and then investigate the evidence in favor of each. More generally, the course will consider the challenges of drawing casual inferences in the field of international political economy. There are no prerequisites for this course but an introductory economy course would be helpful. Students will write a short reading response each week and produce a research proposal for studying a topic related to international political economy, though they do not need to actually conduct this research.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS S3628.
Yaddo is an artists community located in Saratoga Springs, New York. In the words of John Cheever, “the forty or so acres on which the studios and principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts that any other piece of ground in the English speaking community.” Cheever, however, also described Yaddo’s menagerie of creatives as a group of, “lushes down on their luck, men and women at the top of their powers, nervous breakdowns, thieves, geniuses, cranky noblemen, and poets who ate their peas with a knife.” In total this makes for spectacular drama.
Historically speaking Yaddo is an idealized synergy of Gilded Age gender roles and is best understood as ½ Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park (“the Menlo Park factory was a loud, rowdy, and raucous place full of nightly sing-alongs around a large organ, gaming, practical jokes, and midnight feasts”) and one half Settlement House (a space where American women, “expropriated the previously male world of literature and the arts as their own, feeling they possessed a special humanistic sensitivity which provided an alternative to the acquisitive and the competitive goals of men in an industrializing America.”).
Yaddo’s guest list is a “whose who” of American Art and letters. We will, however, study Yaddo as a compelling introduction to the shifts, evolutions, and challenges to American art across the 20th century; including: the study of politically radical art during the 1930s and a remarkable study of Cold War era political threats to American creativity with a special focus on the Lavender Scare.
Because The Yaddo Records (Yaddo’s archive) are at NYPL, and because I served as project archivist for these records we will also spend a day at NYPL that will include introduction to Yaddo’s archive specifically but also to archives more generally. Finally, we will be visited (either in person or online) from a variety of Yaddo alum who will share their experiences and impressions and answer student questions etc.
This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
This course examines the processes of colonization and decolonization that define the making of a modern, integrated world (c. 1500 to the present). We will study primary source materials. We focus on the instruments of colonization—the treaty, the charter, the map, the ethnology—and the engines of decolonization—the manifesto, the resistance, the solidarity with the colonial, the demand for self rule. We are interested in the processes and contents of social and cultural contact and exchange, the development of knowledge, and how they shape relations of power; the place of colonialism in the development of western capitalism; and the elements of colonial power and resistance, including ideologies of liberal political philosophy, social Darwinism, and nationalism. We will consider how ideas about race, civilization, religion, self and other, and freedom have evolved over time and shaped the making of the modern world.
This course explores techniques to harness the power of ``big data'' to answer questions related to political science and/or American politics. Students will learn how to use R---a popular open-source programming language---to obtain, clean, analyze, and visualize data. No previous knowledge of R is required.
We will focus on applied problems using real data wherever possible, using R's ``Tidyverse.'' In total, in this course we will cover concepts such as reading data in various formats (including ``cracking'' atypical government data sources and pdf documents); web scraping; data joins; data manipulation and cleaning (including string variables and regular expressions); data mining; making effective data visualizations; using data to make informed prediction, and basic text analysis. We will also cover programming basics including writing functions and loops in R. Finally, we will discuss how to use R Markdown to communicate our results effectively to outside audiences. Class sessions are applied in nature, and our exercises are designed around practical problems: Predicting election outcomes, determining the author of anonymous texts, and cleaning up messy government data so we can use it.
This course explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of water primarily through ethnographic studies, in a variety of geographic and spatial contexts, that engage both with water itself and with the things that surround and mix with it (pipes, walls, ditches, dirt, waste, sugar). Anthropology encourages us to consider water in its myriad arrangements and meanings—water can be dynamic, vital, threatening, toxic, a material through which our lives are structured and governed. Its relevance has only become heightened amid the constraints and hazards of climatic and sociopolitical change. We will be attentive to the many forms and combinations that characterize water’s place in our world, finding inspiration in its liquid ways while taking care not to become too occupied with its metaphorical qualities. The course is divided into thematic areas that have taken on critical weight and urgency in recent years: water futures, infrastructure and power, urban ecologies, and (de)colonial waters.
Mathematical foundations of machine learning: Linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and probability and statistics. Comprehensive review and additional treatment of
relevant topics used in the analysis and design of machine learning models. Preliminary exposure to core algorithms such as linear regression, gradient descent, principal
component analysis, low-rank approximations, and kernel methods.
What is the source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been the restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why.
This course endeavors to understand the development of the peculiar and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France, the nation-states that are its former African colonies, and other contemporary African states. It covers the period from the 19th century colonial expansion through the current ‘memory wars’ in French politics and debates over migration and colonial history in Africa. Historical episodes include French participation in and eventual withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade, emancipation in the French possessions, colonial conquest, African participation in the world wars, the wars of decolonization, and French-African relations in the contexts of immigration and the construction of the European Union. Readings will be drawn extensively from primary accounts by African and French intellectuals, dissidents, and colonial administrators. However, the course offers neither a collective biography of the compelling intellectuals who have emerged from this relationship nor a survey of French-African literary or cultural production nor a course in international relations. Indeed, the course avoids the common emphasis in francophone studies on literary production and the experiences of elites and the common focus of international relations on states and bureaucrats. The focus throughout the course is on the historical development of fields of political possibility and the emphasis is on sub-Saharan Africa. Group(s): B, C Field(s): AFR, MEU
In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of
The Wire
) President Barak Obama offered that
The Wire
is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of American art in the last couple of decades."
The Wire
combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city. On a more macro level
The Wire
humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.
The Wire
, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end. That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos. Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order):
The Sopranos
;
The Wire
;
Deadwood
;
Madmen
; and
Breaking Bad.
This course will examine British women writers including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in the context of the (long-) nineteenth-century "Woman Question". Our inquiry will engage the controversy over a woman’s status in terms of the social and political debates of early feminism as well as the enigma of “woman’s nature” in light of the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the period. We will consider how women writers negotiate these current social and psychological discourses in the stories they tell about themselves and others: how do they portray a woman’s life, especially as it manifests the tension George Eliot articulates between “inward impulse and outward fact”? We will pay attention to representations of gender, subjectivity, interiority, desire, domestic affections, friendship, education, economic and professional experience, faith, and creativity as reflecting the struggle, rising influence, and emergent identity of woman. In addition to novels, poetry, and drama, we will read excerpts of critical essays from among our primary authors and other prominent thinkers of the period, such as Wollstonecraft, Martineau, Taylor Mill, and Freud, who, by the early twentieth century, still famously puzzles: “What does a woman want?”
This class focuses on the role of a creative producer during development of low budget film. Students will learn the framework for identifying good stories and developing them into a 3-5 minute short screenplay. We will explore the fundamental aspects of script development and the collaborative relationship between a producer and writer during the development phase. Students will learn critical elements such as writing an effective logline, treatment, and screenplay, and how to provide constructive notes and script analysis thereafter. Through lectures, screenings, writing assignments, and discussions, students will complete the course having written a first draft of a short screenplay, revision and set of written notes as a producer.
This practical lab focuses on the fundamental aspects of development, planning and preparation for low budget films. While using a short film script as their own case study – students will learn pitching, development, script breakdown, scheduling, budgeting and fundraising. Discussion of legal issues, location scouting, deliverables, marketing, distribution and film festival strategy will allow students to move forward with their own projects after completing the class. Using weekly assignments, in-class presentations and textbook readings to reinforce each class discussion topic, students will complete the class having created a final prep/production binder for their project, which includes the script breakdown, production schedule, line item budget, financing/fundraising plan and film festival strategy for their chosen script.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation of some problem in chemical engineering or applied chemistry or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Up to 6 points may be counted toward the technical elective content requirement. (Note that if more than 3 points of research are pursued, an undergraduate thesis is required.)
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Research experience for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on practical experience in research. Students work with full-time faculty in their department on a research topic in their discipline.
Independent work involving experiments, computer programming, analytical investigation, or engineering design.
Independent work involving experiments, computer programming, analytical investigation, or engineering design.